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top ten lists

For their final exam, the preservice elementary teachers in my Children’s Literature course compile and present their Top 10 lists for the semester. This is a course with no required texts but fairly intense independent reading requirements. I love seeing what they’ve read and what they’ve loved–and it’s easily one of the best assessments I’ve…

Every other blogger is busy setting goals, making resolutions, and planning for 2018, while I’m still wrapping up 2017. But that’s okay. Podcasts were a big part of my year in 2017. It’s probably not going too far to call it an obsession. While I continued listening to old favorites, I also found several new…

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. 2017 felt like a down year in reading for me. Numbers down, interest down, time invested in reading down. But I’m not sure that’s really true. I managed a picture book a day as well as 100+ other books completed (and probably 100 more…

2017 was another strong year for picture books. As I compiled my top 10 list, I realized that there’s nothing that I’m quite as passionate about as I was about my top two picture books from 2016, They All Saw a Cat and Radiant Child, though Town Is by the Sea comes close. But still. There…

Top Ten Tuesday is a bookish meme hosted by The Broke and Bookish. First on my list is a book I will love as much as Uprooted, The Sorcerer and the Crown, and Ancillary Justice. They’re all fantasy/sci-fi but otherwise fairly different books. They’re alike, however, in being books that I never wanted to end.…

Top Ten Tuesday is a bookish meme hosted by The Broke and Bookish. Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic is a Freebie, so I decided to celebrate the ALA Youth Media Awards, which were announced yesterday. Like so many other teachers and librarians I know, I was up early to watch the announcements live. It’s one…

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme hosted by The Broke and Bookish. This week’s topic? Top Ten Underrated Titles or Hidden Gems. What makes a book underrated? I was planning to be guided by my own intuition, but Kellee and Ricki at Unleashing Readers took a statistical approach that seems far more sound:…